


Paris, 16 July 1637

by Anima Nightmate (faithhope)



Series: All For One At War [17]
Category: The Musketeers (2014)
Genre: Assault, Beginning of a Horrible Friendship, Blackmail, Canon Compliant, Canon Era, Correspondence, Embedded Images, First Meetings, Franco-Spanish War, Gen, Homophobic Language, Military Homophobia, Period-Typical Homophobia, Power Dynamics, Power Play, Toxic Masculinity, Wartime
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-25
Updated: 2019-04-25
Packaged: 2020-01-31 11:51:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,392
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18590698
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/faithhope/pseuds/Anima%20Nightmate
Summary: Paris is mired in heat and quick tempers. Some people know exactly how to take advantage of that kind of thing.*Another installment in the long series of wartime correspondence (and other pieces based around the black box that is the Musketeers during the Spanish War).





	Paris, 16 July 1637

**Author's Note:**

> Image description on hover-over and in end notes.
> 
> This is considerably grimmer than I usually write. I mean: look who it is! If you’d rather skip it, I’ll understand. The next instalment will be along in a week or so.

He is sweating under the – what did that child call it? – _apron_ that is his uniform surcoat. Surcoat! More like an ugly tunic which is neither practical nor pleasing to the eye. It pinches in all the wrong places and hangs loose elsewhere, gathering his body’s heat and sending it back to him, like carrying around his own tent.

Better than nothing, though. A badge. A belonging.

“You out tonight?”

“Hmm?”

A cuff around the back of the head. “I said: you out tonight?”

“What? Oh. No. Knackered.” The word is nearly easy on his tongue after five years here.

“Fucking lightweight.”

“Yeah, come on, ya pansy. Northern ponce.”

He shoves the flinch down deep. “Seriously. I’ve been on double shifts. I need to lie down before I fall down.”

“Suit yourself, Ginger.”

“I will, thanks,” he mutters.

He hangs the hated helmet on his hook, shucks off his tunic-tent with a groan for the waft of staleness and the blessing of cool air around him then, with a quick look either way, lifts his own doublet off the tunic’s lower hook.

Nothing.

He shakes his head gently, trying not to sigh too loudly for the relief. Maybe they’ve just given up. He remembers his mother saying: “Just ignore them and they’ll go away,” grimaces for it.

_Even a stopped clock is right twice a day, ma._

He lodges the heavy tunic on its mercifully bare hook, swings his doublet onto his shoulders, leaving it open for all the good it’ll do. Paris is like a steam bath this time of year.

He eats quickly, and alone, for the third time this week. For the filling of his belly only. His eyes still scan reflexively for Dupont and Marchand, and he despises that, calls it weakness, this seeking the warmth of their gaze.

“Oi! Ginger!” He keeps chewing. His hair’s not even that bright these days – another Breton legacy faded. They’ll tire of the nickname, find something else. “I said oi!” Closer, then right in his face.

“Leave ’im be.”

“Your friends gone the Front, you think you’re too good to sit wiv us.”

“I’m just tired,” he responds, mildly, cursing himself beneath for engaging. They always want to engage. “Besides,” he adds, on a small gamble, “I thought you’d already gone out.”

“Didn’t look for us, though, didja?”

He lets a small frown collect across him. “Didn’t know you were so desperate for my company…”

“Wha? Nah. Just. Fuck you, anyway, was just tryna be friendly.” His interrogator leans in, glaring, picks something off his plate, eats it with a scowl, then is pulled away by genial arms. “Come on!”

Thing is: sometimes he wants that bawdy camaraderie. Sometimes it’s like food or drink to him to be draining tankards, singing, swaying, shouting, scuffling. Always shouting. The louder the better. Barely able to hear your own thoughts.

They return, louder than ever. What he wants, it turns out, is a bath. A proper one.

There’s no rule says they have to be in uniform all the time, it’s just that they’re the finest clothes most of them have. Also the most weather-proof. And there’s something about knowing that the man you’re following is a trained soldier to put at least casual thieves off. He doesn’t want to be a soldier tonight, so he goes as he is, weapons belt like a swagger, weighting his walk, doublet still loose and flapping a little at the speed of his stride.

As he goes, the way gets narrower, more winding, darker, the houses leaning into each other like a secret as people cling to the gathering dark, increasingly avoid each other’s faces. This is not somewhere likely to receive street lighting anytime in the near future. _Likely they’d tear it down and molest the lamplighters_ he thinks, sees one importunate soul veer from the sneer this cynicism summons on him. He squares his shoulders, hurries on. He may not wear helmet, pauldron, or any other device, but everything about him snarls that he is not someone to be fucked with. In other places, obviously, this is exactly the kind of image that will beckon would-be fuckers-with, but here everyone’s content to let another man’s business be his own.

Closer to his destination, the buildings stand a little straighter, and the whores sway and beckon under lamps, champions not far off in the shadows. He bypasses each with a stony face. He just wants a bath. A proper bath. Someone staggers into his path and he jinks, then jinks again as they mirror him. His hand goes to his belt and they throw their hands up, but his hard grin at this sags when they follow the gesture to push their hood back.

It’s Jacques. He sighs. “Not on duty, Jacques, give it a rest, yeah?”

“I know that, sir, I know. Got eyes in me, ain’t I? Just wondered…”

“Keep your fucking voice down!” he hisses through his teeth, clamps a hard grasp to just above his elbow, steers him into a wall, ungently. “You want everyone here to know I’m–”

“Sorry, sorry, sorry, si– ma– er. Sorry.”

“What do you want?” he relents, letting the wretch go. Jacques is teetering, in the ledger of his mind, right on the cusp of More Trouble Than He’s Worth, and he could probably buy better informants, but that takes coin he doesn’t have. Not yet.

“Just hungry, ennit? Just wondered, y’know, friendly face, just, just, just _hungry_ , ennit, y’know?”

“Thirsty too, I’ll be bound.” He feels his eyes roll. He’s not got much more than what he needs for a proper bath, not really.

“Yeah, yeah…” his whole body sways alarmingly, like a top on its last gyrations, rights itself with a small prod from him. “Yeah, now you mention it offic– off, of course, yeah, defnitly–”

“How much?” he interrupts, wearily.

“A sou or two, is all–”

“A _whole fucking sou?_ ” He takes a half-step towards him in only partly-exaggerated anger.

More wobbling. “A few deniers’ll do me fine, sir, mate, yeah. Please?”

He feels his eyes roll, digs in his pocket where the smaller coins rattle. Distracted, startled, he throws the smallest few of what he has at the sorry bastard, barges past him to barrel up the street until he’s near a better light.

“Can I help you, love?”

“No thanks, just need the light,” he replies absently.

“Lights on is extra, precious.”

“Oh, fuck off,” he returns, turning his flattest look her way. Or him. Hard to tell, under the paint. He gets a knowing arch of eyebrow in return, retreats from it, then hurries onwards, stuffing the paper back in his doublet pocket.

In the same hand as before, it reads:

He has no idea when it turned up. Any one of a score of skilled hands could have slipped it into his pocket between the garrison and here. Hell, it could have been in his pocket _at_ the garrison. Too relieved not to see it, he hadn’t checked.

Shit.

Not least, he’s feeling particularly spooked by the location – it’s exactly where he’s heading already. His pace falters as he considers going elsewhere, then frowns – fuck it, why should some nameless cunt put him to this trouble? Soon find out they’re messing with the wrong man, won’t they? Fists clenched, he covers the remaining distance in short, jagged strides.

The familiar sensations of anticipation are filling him as he rounds the corner. It starts as a warmth in his chest which coils around the cold in his belly until he’s a pleasant swirl, skin prickling. Soon he’ll be clean, sweat dripping, chasing the bad humours away, nothing but his own warm, buoyed-up, fog-masked self to please. The thought’s like a hot hand stroking all the right places. No names, no badges, no affiliations, no _shame_. He can feel his muscles shift already. All he has to do is to make it through the front door without anyone else getting in his way.

A handful of citizens pass him – all solo, some leaving the establishment, others just minding their own shadowed business. He has one foot on the first step when a close, dark voice says: “I see you got my message.”

He spins, but the speaker is already a clear three feet from him, gazing steadily and calmly from beneath his hood. He could be any of the figures that passed him in the last couple of minutes – hell, the last half-hour. His eyes flick, taking in as much detail as the shrouded, still figure will give him. Shorter than him, but that by no means makes him short. Broad-shouldered, bearded. He thinks. The eyes that gleam back at him tell him nothing except that he will need to get closer to know the intent in them better.

Getting closer to him would be a mistake, but that thought’s drowned in the thwarted heat in him rising any way it would, propelling him off the steps and towards his tormentor.

“Now, now,” says the figure, backing, and he snarls in pursuit, accelerating, shoulders forward to close with him.

And then matters become rapidly confusing as the figure jinks and it seems like his own speed is used against him to whirl him into the darkness in the lee of the stairs, and he finds himself pressed against the railings that guard the basement rooms, feeling one spike in particular make itself very well known to his lower back.

“What do you want?” he manages in a kind of hoarse, whispered scream.

“All I’ve wanted, all along, is to talk.”

“Talk!” he spits. “Yeah, _right!_ ”

The other is pressed against him, using his bulk to keep him off-balance, left forearm hard along his collarbone, left fist clenched in his loose doublet, right ostentatiously at his own waist. Tension sings in every line of his body, but his voice is mild as butter. “Just talk, that’s all. You have something I might need. And I have something you definitely need.”

“What the _fuck_ would I need from someone like _you?!_ ”

“Silence.”

There is rather a lot of it crowding at him now, while his thoughts are a whining buzz of anything but. He deliberately makes his own body relax, stop pushing back, and immediately the hooded man steps away, enough to unhook himself from the railing, and to pull down his doublet and shirt, brush himself down.

“Explain yourself,” he demands.

“Not here.”

The fuck with this. He gets his hand behind him on his main gauche and leans into the man’s space, who gives not an inch.

“Don’t you know who I am?”

“More importantly,” says the dark man, still level, still quiet, “I know _what_ you are…”

Half his dagger has cleared its sheath when he’s grabbed, by the throat this time, rammed against the side of the steps, jarring his arm, which is trapped behind him.

“Easy, easy, _easy_ ,” breathes the stranger, but he can’t help it, squirms and writhes for purchase, gasping for breath, and suddenly the other’s right hand is hard around his balls, and every sense of self-preservation clenches him to a quivering halt.

“Glnch! Nrrr!”

“Shut it and listen to me.”

“ _Hnnn!_ ”

“I’ve told you that I just want to talk. We need to get to know each other a little better.”

“Hrfn!”

“Hush, hush, hush. We’re just going to have a quiet little chat. And since you refuse to come _quietly_ ,” a brief squeeze of his right hand, the rest delivered through his teeth, “we’ll have to do the proper introductions here.”

He glares through red-ringed fog, but the stranger seems to see something in his suffused rictus that speaks to him. “Now I’m going to ease off you a touch, and you’re going to ease off that little toy, and we’ll talk.” The horrible pressure slackens and he coughs, debates spitting the resultant gozz in his captor’s face, thinks better of it.

“Aye, just swallow it,” says the fucker. “Good lad.”

“You’re from the North.” He can’t believe that’s the first thing out of his mouth.

“I’m from all over, son, but yeah. Like you, I heard the call of the capital, found myself here with all these other wretched souls. Only difference is: we’re better than this. Our stars are brighter.” All of this in that level, matter-of-fact tone. The man could be musing to himself, for all he matters.

And he still has his hand on his crotch. And there’s a problem there, alright.

“Life tries to keep us down, keep us in place, and we know we belong higher, feel the need to _rise_ in us like a hunger.”

Yep, definitely a problem. The man eases his grip a little further and, fuck his life, the blood rushes in, like a relief. Maybe he… won’t notice.

The man cocks his head to one side. “The thing is, Georges. May I call you Georges?”

He nods, tries to think of cold things, horrible things, boring things. Fuck’s _sake_ , man.

His grip tightens again. Georges’s eyes close.

“Problem is that we have things in our life trying to drag us down, back into the filth. Me? I was born to what I can only call fucking hideous circumstances, and all I’ve known is pain and death and gnawing hunger, and I clawed my way up to where I am by being the best at being what I can only describe as an utter cunt. No place for me but more of the same. You, however, are hard-working; a decent enough, if somewhat overlooked, soldier with a natural flair for command. Only problem is that you have a temper, and a secret, and you throttle one for fear of the other, not making the right kind of friends, keeping everyone at arm’s length in case they find out. Am I right?”

And fuck him, but the heel of his hand slides, a little up-down motion on his undeniably hard shaft. A moan threatens to break out of his throat and he strangles it.

Then his fingers tighten again and a grotesque sound leaks out from between Georges’s teeth.

“Am. I. Right?”

“Yes! Yes, God curse you and the Devil take you.”

And this bastard smiles. He actually smiles at his breathless condemnation. “As he no doubt will in time. In the meanwhile,” and the next comes through his teeth, “I might as well enjoy what time I have here, might I not?” And he leans close, his fingers gentling again and Georges feels the shame swell with his desire and his hate. He braces himself for some kind of hard, biting kiss, closing his eyes, vowing to endure, and when it doesn’t come, the scent and heat of the man drawing back, the disappointment he feels is worse than the relief.

“Sadly for you,” says the godawful son of a putrid whore, mildly, withdrawing altogether and dusting his hands off, “my tastes don’t quite run your way. Happily for me, I know that at least ten of your regiment would beat you to death and hang you to boot, if they didn’t set you on fire first. If they were to find out.”

“I will fucking kill you.”

“You will fucking not. And do you want to know why?”

“Not particularly.”

He smiles, a hard glint in the light flowing from the baths. “And yet we’re still talking. So while you’re considering your options, consider this: I still haven’t told you what I might need from you.”

“And?”

“And how does Captain Marcheaux sound?”

He blinks hard. “What?” Irritated, he shakes this nonsense away with his head, draws his dagger.

The hood cocks to one side. He actually gets the impression that the fucker is amused. “I have the keys to a proper commission.”

He frowns deeper, “No-one _buys_ captaincy.”

A sound almost like a tut. “And this is why you’re still where you are. Within three happy accidents, the position could be yours in, say, six months.”

He shakes his head. “If I get it, I want to have earned it.”

A sigh. Like Marcheaux has disappointed him. “You know no-one of influence, you keep your head down too much, and the current Captain’s far too young and fit. Your only real friends have gone to fight for their country, and you get lonely with monotonous regularity, which brings you here, where most of your spare coin goes. You need a break, but who’s going to give you a break?”

“ _You_ ’re going to give me a break?” He doesn’t bother keeping the sneer out of his voice.

“In a manner of speaking. First, I’m going to introduce you to a couple of people, and then we’ll see what kind of break we give you.”

He turns his back, the rotten gimcrack, and strolls away slowly.

“This way,” he says, still quiet, still maddeningly calm.

He takes two paces forward, stops. “How do you know I won’t stab you in the back?”

An amused eye is cast over his shoulder. “One, because you’re too curious now. Two,” he turns and starts to walk again, “because you don’t know who else knows what I know. Three,” and he raises his voice to carry the longer distance, “because you don’t know where my bravos are.”

“You’re bluffing!” he calls, then looks around.

“What was that?” He stops, twists a little.

He moves towards him, dagger still in his hand. “I said: you’re bluffing.”

A quiet chuff of what might be laughter. The hood shakes slowly side to side. “And you’re in the open.” A whistle between his teeth and a flick of the head. A man in a horrible surcoat and a worse hat steps out of a alleyway. The scant light of the street’s establishments picks out an earring and grim expression. Along with a brace of primed pistols. “Meet Voisard. He hates guards.”

“I dunno,” says the bravo in the dragging whine of a Calais wharf rat, “some of them can be quite tasty…”

“Stop showing off,” drawls his employer, “you only ate that one guard’s nose.”

“There was that ear that time…”

“Sadly before our acquaintance. Shall we?” he adds over his shoulder.

Marcheaux curses under his breath, vehemently and at length, sheathes his weapon, and draws level with his tormentor, who waves Voisard away. The latter fades backwards from view with a sneer.

Silently, they step on together, the man setting a brisk pace, only speaking to indicate a change of direction, but just as often merely pointing. Well, not as if they were going to share childhood reminiscences of life outside Paris. After a while, the neighbourhood becomes significantly higher class than those that have gone before it. Rather broader streets, rather more pillars, rather larger frontages. The other slows to something more like a stroll.

“And what do I call you?”

“You can call me Grimaud.”

“Jesus.”

“No: Lucien.”

He grits his teeth. “What do you do, Grimaud? Apart from blackmail and assault, that is.”

“I sell commodities. Right now, you’re one of them.”

“Fuck you.”

“I told you before – not my taste.” He comes to a halt, draws Marcheaux around to face him with a hand on his arm. Marcheaux looks down, sees the street light flickering on a fistful of rings, looks up, sees dark eyes staring up into his.

“The man I’m going to introduce you to. He’s your best shot. Use it well.”

“Why are you doing this?”

“I believe in investment, taking the long-term view as I never could when I was young…” He shakes his head, looking almost amused at his own words. Then his face slips to serious, and Marcheaux feels cold twining through his guts again. “I guard my investments well. Fuck this up and you’ll only briefly know my disappointment.” A hard sliver of grin like broken glass. He steers him towards the house and they mount the stairs together. “Besides, I reckon he’s as lonely as you are. And he has a big bath upstairs.”

Before Marcheaux can process all these promises properly, the glittering fist is knocking on the door, which is swinging open on quiet hinges, and somehow he’s being ushered into somewhere that has him hastily scrubbing his fingers through his hair and buttoning his doublet.

When the door closes behind him, he doesn’t look back.

**Author's Note:**

> #### Text of Grimaud’s note
> 
> "THE BATHS. RUE DE RÉNARD. TONIGHT."
> 
> #### Further Notes
> 
> Went down another rabbit hole re: Parisian bathing houses and street lighting. In the end, made it simpler on myself, as you see! 😊
> 
> And yeah, got blocked writing this. 😒 Quite honestly, knowing this was coming up is probably part of why the final chapter of the preceding instalment got blocked. And then I got ahead of myself again the other evening and started writing the Aramis-Porthos reunion scenes (which aren’t coming (haha) for ages yet), and somehow that spurred me on. "No-one will get to read the earnest angst!porn if you don’t finish this…" Good point, inner adult.


End file.
